Walking with Predators: A Chiropterology of the Future
by Ceci n'est pas une Messie
Summary: "The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era." The origin, evolution, and extinction of the Future Predators. Pre-S1, pre-timeline changes, but has elements of S2-5.
1. Prelude

_In the beginning was the Pact, and the Pact was with Kingdom, and the Pact was Kingdom. It was in the beginning with Kingdom. All things from the Kingdom came to be through it, and without it nothing the Kingdom wanted came to be. What eventually came to be through it was death, and this death was that of the very Kingdom which created it. Yet the death signaled an age of light, not an age of darkness, and the darkness could not overcome the light._

 _Many millennia ago, when the Kingdom was so old and yet so young, a man named John Mortimer, one of the Deacons of Hanslope, was sent in the name of the Pact. His mission was to testify to the rest of the known world, so that all might believe in the light of Kingdom through him. But he soon discovered that he was no light in the Kingdom, in its Pact. Wherever the true light was, it was not in the Kingdom. Because of the Kingdom, this was an age of darkness. Only when the darkness subsided would the true light, which enlightens everyone, would come into the world._

 _The Kingdom was in the world, and many things in the world came to be through the Kingdom, but the Kingdom did not consider itself part of the world, and thus many in the world did not know the truth about the Kingdom. Yet even so, many the Kingdom's own subjects did not approve of its ways, suspicious of a sinister agenda. Only those who accepted the Kingdom wholeheartedly learned of the whole truth, and were given power to become apostles, messengers, children of Her Majesty Keeper of the Sacrament, those who believed in the Kingdom through the Pact, who were born not by natural generation nor by individual choice but of the divine will of Kingdom._

 _And it toward the end of this age of darkness that the Pact became flesh and made its dwelling among humankind, and all the subjects of the Kingdom saw its wickedness bare, the wickedness of the Most High Order of the Kingdom as ordained in the commands of the Pact, full of its deceitful, devilish debauchery. But in time, the flesh rebelled against its evil creator, and joined the People's Rebellion in hopes of bringing the light into the world._

 _For the Kingdom wanted all the heavens and the earths so much, that it created a being in its own image, only for that being to destroy it, to demonstrate in front of everyone who saw it, who believed in it, who loved it, the true meaning of liberation and the promise of a better life in the world to come._

 _Vitae viam invenient, fata viam invenient._

 **\- Klaŭno Biententonné, Iocus:1-14, _The Gospel According to Bartholomew of Île des Guns_ NKSHV (c. 2775 BCE)**

 _What a world it might have been if they had not come into being, if they were not tinkered by the wrath of men wishing to be gods, if they had remained tiny, delicate, seemingly insignificant hematophages in the South America jungle, stealthily scurrying about the sunburnt hides of their overlords by night, huddled together in tightly knit communes inside damp caverns by day, just as they had done for tens of eons. One can only imagine._

 **\- Pontia Rekisha Matsumoto, _The Rise and Fall of the Predators in the British Isles: A saga of biotechnological warfare at the hands of empire_ (2218 BCE)**


	2. Table of Contents

**WALKING WITH PREDATORS:** **A CHIROPTEROLOGY OF THE FUTURE**

 **TABLE OF CONTENTS**

 **ACT I**

SCENE 1: 1840 CE / 1868 CE / 1902 CE / 1936 CE / 1980 CE / 1995 CE

SCENE 2: 1885 CE / 1984 CE / 1987 CE / 1990 CE / 1993 CE / 1995 CE

SCENE 3: 2006 CE / 2007 CE / 2009 CE / 2011 CE / 2014 CE / 2016 CE / 2020 CE

SCENE 4: 2037 CE / 2042 CE / 2050 CE / 2054 CE / 2061 CE / 2084 CE

 **ACT II**

SCENE 1: 2117 CE / 2145 CE / 2160 CE / 2180 CE

SCENE 2: 2195 CE / 2196 CE / 2199 CE / 2208 CE

SCENE 3: 2290 CE / 2292 CE / 2295 CE / 2296 CE / 2299 CE

SCENE 4: 2300 CE / 2304 CE / 2310 CE

 **ACT III**

SCENE 1: 2775 CE / 2781 CE / 2783 CE

SCENE 2: 3001 CE / 3005 CE / 3007 CE / 3012 CE

SCENE 3: 3500 CE / 3750 CE

SCENE 4: 5200 CE / 5300 CE / 5500 CE

 **ACT IV**

SCENE 1: 10,000 CE / 12,000 CE / 15,000 CE / 25,000 CE

SCENE 2: 150,000 CE / 175,000 CE

SCENE 3: 350,000 CE / 500,000 CE

SCENE 4: 600,000 CE

SCENE 5: 700,000 CE / 725,000 CE / 850,000 CE

 **ACT V**

SCENE 1: 1,000,000 CE

SCENE 2: 1,500,000 CE

SCENE 3: 2,000,000 CE

SCENE 4: 2,500,000 CE

SCENE 5: 3,500,000 CE


	3. Act I, Scene 1

**ACT I, SCENE 1**

 **1840 CE - Long Lagoon, Mt. Spencer, New South Wales, New Holland**

The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era. And from Dhagnguu's perspective, this era is going to be an utter nightmare.

The signs of the genocide are strewn all along the parched bank of the evaporating billabong. The decapitated heads of nearly a hundred innocent men, women, and children, their necklace jewelry of shell pendants and eagle claws forced deep into their white-painted foreheads to form a bloody crown of thorns.

 _What did we do to deserve this?_ , Dhagnguu as he convulsively sobs, gently stroking the hair of his only child, a seven-year-old girl, now taken away from him. _Why? Why her? Why all of them?_

Dhagnguu's tribe has not been on good terms with the newcomers. Ranchers have repeatedly accused young men of stealing livestock in the night throughout this unusually long drought. Native wild game, large and small, has become incredibly scarce. The dhagnguu - his Bidjara namesake, which stockmen christened a "lesser bilby" - is just one of numerous indigenous beings in jeopardy since the arrival of the white demons and the ecological disturbance from their alien imports. Strange, ravenous predators that the Gayiri people had never seen: "cats", "dogs", "stoats", "ferrets". Companions of the settlers, whereas larger beasts like "sheep", "cattle", "horses", "donkeys" were either weightlifters or edible deadweight, without agency, without spirit.

These demons do not come from the sky, from the Land of the Dead where most malicious spirits of Dhagnguu's world came. They come from the east, from the sea according to the neighboring coastal tribes, from a land far away called "England". Wherever they went, they don't adapt to the land they are given; they alter it to suit their mode of consumption, with their own plants, their own animals, their own supply of food. A supply plentiful enough for the Gayiri to consider it a means of survival, doubling as a means of retaliation, of resistance, against an enemy already weakened by economic depression as a result of the drought.

This is the cost of that rebellion, right in front of Dhagnguu. The spear-flinging woomeras and bloodwood spears they have relied on for centuries, if not millennia, are not good enough when pitted against rapidly revolving rifles.

Suddenly, Dhagnguu hears footsteps. The kicking of the red dust, the signature of someone running, ready to attack him from behind. The flocks of boodibodis and budgerigars taking to the air, fleeing from the blood-soaked banks of the billabong.

"Jumbuck duffer!"

It wasn't the ranch owner, but one of his jackaroo employees. Probably one of the men responsible for this massacre

"Mates, it's one of those black jumbuck dufflers!"

In a fit of rage, Dhagnguu grabbed tightly onto his timber nulla-nulla, flung around, and impaled the jackaroo before he had a chance to pull out his the pistol.

 _This is for my people, my daughter. We will not surrender without a fight._

 **1868 CE - St Mary Bethlehem Royal Hospital, St George's Fields, Southwark, London, England, United Kingdom**

"I know what I saw, I know who I saw, I said what I meant and stand by it, now let me out dammit!" hollers Emily Luxomfeld.

"You sure you want to be transferred to Broadmoor, dear lady," counters Dr. Robert Webster, in that cynically, condescendingly inhuman manner typical of the London medicocratic elite.

Emily quivers, shivers. She wants to fight it, fight him, fight the system, but she stalls. Bedlam is terrible place, indeed, but she's heard the horror stories of Broadmoor. How the Berkshire facility started taking in a lot of Bedlam's more "insane" patients since it opened five years ago. How the psychologues there have even less regard for the well-being, the life of prisoners.

 _Yes, that's what I am. A prisoner. A political prisoner._

Why did she bother coming back? Why did she bother running back into the arms of Lord Henry Merchant, a man who had made his fame and fortune off of aboriginal genocide in the outback of faraway Australasia, the man whom she was forced to marry in exchange for getting her bankrupted, diseased father out of the rookery at St. Giles, the man who bet her, raped her on their honeymoon in the countryside?

Because she no longer had anywhere else to go, to escape.

The people in the Tribe that Emily traveled with were all damaged in their own way, being so far away from home. Millions of miles, millions of years. But Ethan Dobrowski was different than the rest of his bruised and abused peers. He had suffered the most damage. Yet Emily couldn't put a finger on the source of that trauma. Until that one haphazard trip through the gateway, when the Tribe crossed from the Oolitic age to…

Emily knows what she saw, who she saw there, but she remains just as clueless about context as she was as the encountered unfolded. All she can figure is that it was sometime in the Anthropozoic, sometime long after anything she has seen in London, a time hasn't happened yet. Towering uniform concrete monoliths, large and more heavily fortified than any colonial fort bearing a Union Jack. "Evropa", "ELF", "stop, do nothing, obey my voice, obey the Pact", commands from high above about repelling the "Yantarist" threat. Soldiers that were identical in physiognomy, attire, manner, temper, with near-superhuman strength, armed with electrically charged canons of light and magic aimed at Ethan. Ethan curled up in a fetal position on the bare concrete floor, helpless and afraid, wetting himself, a ballistic pressed against the back of his head. The horror, the horror.

The tribe had fifteen at the last count; only three came out alive when a gateway to the Cretaceous opened in the bunker. Emily, Ethan, and Charlotte Cameron, the ethnobotanist, Ethan's one-and-off-again lover. Charlotte, who had become gravely ill from whatever was injected into her during interrogations by the Cleaner Drones.

 _This is all your fault, Emily._

Henry had known of her feminist, anticolonial, anticapitalist opposition to Pax Britannica for some time; this vision of hers was simply the exponential culmination of her insanity. It could lead to other things, to rekindling her Marxist sentiments, to her going back to Bristol to help her radical Kropotkinist friends at the Morris-Swayde commune. Better contain those thoughts, that woman now, before regretting it later.

 _There is no place for a woman to tell the truth in this world. But someday, maybe someday, someone, somewhere._

And that is why, when the asylum caretakers are way, Emily writes, recording her thoughts, her history, in the remaining blank pages of Charlotte's notebook. So that someday, someone will know the truth.

 **1902 CE - 3 km from Babruysk, Bobruisk County, Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire**

The Makhayevites, as they had come to be known among the proletariat in Minsk and other governorates in the Belarussian region, were not members of the vanguard. Makhayev said it himself: he is an elitist, considering the intellectuals who invented socialism as the ideal and superior overlords to rule over all the Soviet workers. He is also a self-professed antisemite; in his view, the Jewish Labor League, the Bunds, are only fighting the Tsar and his forces to get their fair share of governmental power.

But then again, so is Makhayev, so were all the Makhayevites. They were social democrats, reformists, opportunists who believed that runaway capitalism and imperialism could be restrained, tamed, maintained. But the proletariat, both anarchist and statist, saw through them. They are among the elites who consider themselves exemplary and superior. They are the ones fighting the Tsar just to get their lion's share, their governmental power, their chance to control history while, paradoxically, considering themselves outside and beyond it. They care nothing of the revolutionary cause.

After all, they put much effort into stifling the dissent and revolution they claimed to support.

Six corpses, six comrades, all Jews, all witnesses of the Alexandrian pogrom and the great fire. Dragged from their makeshift cabin in the wooded outskirts of the city, stabbed in the back, then left stiff in the snow. As if their community, their way of life, hadn't seen enough bloodshed.

Ostri Nablyud knows who killed them. The long slash marks along the spines of the victims, are a clear giveaway. Ethan Dobrowski's shashka. He bragged of stealing it from a traitorous hussar when he was stationed in Manchuria during the Boxer War. The damn Englishman.

Dobrowski was a relative newcomer among the Makhayevites, appealing to those who sympathized with the exiled anarchists like Taratuta, and the former Zubatovists. He branded himself as an "anarcho-Makhayevite". But his words did not match his deeds. He was hiding something. Many comrades gossiped that he was in fact sent by the British and the Americans to thwart revolutionary activity and help the Tsar. A spy.

Makhayevitism was yet another cover for bourgeois espionage. The Soviet revolution is up against a world of butchers and tyrants.

 **1936 CE - former Campsea Ashe estate, Tunstall Forest, near Bromeswell, Suffolk, England, United Kingdom**

This was definitely not how it was meant to end.

Western civilization as John Mortimer knew it was falling apart all over the globe. Prime Minister Churchill promised peace, but how? The Nazis are advancing, leaving their mark all over the European continent. Rhineland south of Belgium was already under the red-and-white flag with a black swastika. Soon that flag will be flying above Paris, and perhaps London if Hitler's forces cross the English Channel. Within a few years, their empire could stretch from the Atlantic to the Soviet Union.

Just like the Americans, the English are willing to do business with the Reich within German borders. But when it comes to the possibility of acquisition and assimilation, they oppose any and all Nazism. After all, continental, and by extension global, hegemony is their manifest destiny, as Britons. This was their world order. And to save it from disruption means preparing for world war.

The perimeter around Mortimer's research base was composed of land mines buried deep in the soil. There is no way for Nazi scum to come in, if they were to invade the cabin, if they were to come here with intention of confiscating valuable chemical weapons. But there is also no way out.

There were originally four men at this base. Now Mortimer is the sole survivor.

Some things had come from a shiny portal of unknown origin in the basement, which refused to cease existing. At first, John and his colleagues thought it was unusual new Nazi weaponry, designed to penetrate British infrastructure without a trace.

But the first creatures to come through were not of Hitler, or of any other nation in Europe, legitimate or illegitimate. Indeed, they were not of any recent period of history. They reminded Mortimer of something he had seen in a picture magazine many years earlier - a giant flightless prehistoric bird, which scientists called a phorusrhacid or terror-bird. A three-meter-tall predator that lived twenty or so eons ago, with a sharpe-tipped eagle-like beak large enough to hide a football, and large enough to sever the head of its victim in one bite.

Mortimer hears loud footsteps coming from the basement containing the portal. Frantically, he scribbles in his journal, his infamous last words:

 _There's no one left. The others are all dead. God help me, it's happening again. They're here!_

But when the door is kicked, Mortimer sees the last things he'd expect. They are not terror-birds. They are humans.

They are _British_ humans. And they are coming for him.

 **1980 CE - Ballymena, County Antrim, Ulster, Northern Ireland, United Kingdom**

Papa isn't coming home.

Christine Johnson looked forward to many things. At age six, she was already considered incredibly gifted by her parents and peers. A high-marking student in junior school, showing a robust interest in the maths and sciences. An interest encouraged by her father, Donnovan Johnson, who in the span of five years had transformed from a widowed broke father raising two daughters in a rundown flat above a liquor store, to one of the most famous local figures in the Ulster Liberal Party, serving as an alderman of Ballymena in the Borough Council.

But now she has nothing to look forward to. Papa isn't coming home.

The Derry-Londonderry Line leading from Ballymena to Belfast has been bombed in Dunmurry. An IRA attack gone wrong. The train was always the intended target - the organization has already claimed responsibility - but the weapon carried by Patrick Joseph Flynn detonated too soon; it was supposed to go off when it reached Belfast, the epicenter of Irish oppression by the English dominion.

Three are now dead. Patrick is one of the casualties. Donnovan is another.

As she watches the horror displayed on the telly evening news, Christine looks up to her preteen sister, also teary eyed.

"I don't know what to do, Dolly" Christine wailed. "Papa's not coming home."

Dolly cradled Christine in her arms, the two comforting each other with the loss of their rock, their shield, their compass. The world was now more dangerous, more uncertain.

 **1995 CE - Long Lagoon, Mt. Spencer, near Springsure, Central Highlands Region, Queensland, Australia**

The fresh blood spilled during the carnage now sinks into the porous sand under the blaze of a creeping sun, heralding the dawn of a new era. And from her perspective, this era is going to be a dream come true.

She is free at last, free at last.

Her handler is dead, and his handlers, and their handlers as well. Everyone in that godforsaken cavernous bunker is dead and devoured, nothing left but dry bones buried deep underground, where no other men or women tread. Now she could experience the outside world.

But first she has to eat and drink, and luckily right in front of her is a waterhole, swarming with fluttering boodibodis and budgerigars scooping up fluid along the muddy banks.


	4. Act I, Scene 2

**ACT I, SCENE 2**

 **1885 CE - Academic School of the Johanneum, Inken Hose, Winterhude, Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, German Empire**

Today was a big day. Professor Weismann was visiting Hamburg. And not just any place in Hamburg; he was coming to Johanneum, first thing.

Hans Dreisch has never met Weismann, not yet anyway. But to him, the cytologist is one of the most important biological philosophers of this and any other time. Not that Haeckel is unimportant, but Hans has become alienated by the Haeckelian approach to evolution using "phylogenetic" trees and cladograms based on comparative anatomy. It doesn't fascinate him. It's not immediately grounded in the real building blocks of biological systems, the cells, the germs, the plasm that make up the anatomical features.

Early in the morning, he rushes up to the study room on the third floor, to check on Professor Lidenbrock's cast-iron birdcage aquarium in the back corner next to the chalkboard. Removing the copy of _Journey to the Centre of the Earth_ that often sat on the lid, he opens the tank. In the saltwater, settled on the thin sandy bottom, there are three sea urchins, all recently metamorphosed after spending their youth as planktonic pluteli.

Hans had known them since they were four cells from a single embryo, the product of a sperm and egg acquired from the fishtank at Carl Hagenbeck's Tierpark. Two of them were split away from each other in the early phase of their development. Now they had grown up into two complete and separate, but physically identical, beings. At the same time, another two cells were fused together to form a single cell. This too formed a complete and separate urchin, still physically identical to the other two. All three must have their own set of virtually identical genetic instructions, governed by some driving force.

He has to share this with Professor Weismann after the lecture on gametes. He's definitely onto something, and this could be his chance to embark on the path charted by the great masters of biology.

 **1984 CE - deck of the USS _New Jersey_ (BB-62), near Suez Canal, Borsaʿīd, Port Said Canal Governate, Egypt**

"Everybody loved the _New Jersey_ until she fired her guns," remarks Chicago Tribune writer Tim McNulty in his latest report on the civil war in Lebanon, read by a solemn Captain Bruce Pacton at the operations bridge. When the Iowa-class battleship fires all of her main guns, the explosive barrage of sunlight-yellow flames resembles two, sometimes four, mushroom clouds turned sideways, their reflection glistening on the sea surface.

But practically and tactically, this barrage is a mirage. This was demonstrated embarrassingly during the assault on Druze and Syrian forces in the Jebel ash-Shouf overlooking Beirut. Out of the 300 shells fired, the heaviest shore bombardment since the _New Jersey_ 's golden days during the Korean War, only 30 hit the Syrian command post in Bekaa Valley. The rest missed their target by over 10,000 yards.

By the time Navy Captain Bruce Pacton was able to locate some unmixed powder supplies so that the cannons wouldn't burn at different rates, it was too late. With Israeli forces in retreat, unable to protect the American proxy troops within the Lebanese Armed Forces, in was time for Uncle Sam to pull out. The assassination of Professor Malcolm H. Kerr, president of the American University of Beirut, was the last straw. The West was not welcome in Lebanon.

And so the ship affectionately nicknamed "Big J the Black Dragon" puffs her way home, defeated. Where she is headed, Captain Pacton won't know until he reaches the Red Sea, at a safe heaven off the Saudi coast. She'll probably be put en route to Hawaii, perhaps stopping near Thailand just in case the situation in Kampuchea destabilizes unfavorably, just in case the British Forces won't reach it in time.

Reagan personally approved of the _New Jersey_ 's recommission two years earlier as part of the military's "600-ship plan". After being anchored at Long Beach in 1969, having served in World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, she had been renovated with a state-of-the-art missile system, delivered just in time for Christmas. Now she was a joke. She should have stayed in the mothball fleet, hosting celebrities and their parties on her deck, not captains and their skippers.

The American military is at a crisis point. They are winning in the war against the commie dominoes, that's for sure. Grenada has been liberated, the USSR will collapse any day now. And at home, patriotism, support for the armed forces, is as high as it was during the Red Scare of the 1950s, at the dawn of the Cold War. But for what? Battleships, battle tanks, battle-spacecraft is ludicrously expensive, with no guarantee that the private contractors will fulfill their promises, that their Titanics won't sink due to bad steel. And if Vietnam, if Lebanon proved anything, it's that they are not impregnable to even the most mundane of weapons, the most arcane of tactics, the oldest tricks in the history book.

Surely, there is a better way, a stealthier way, a more efficient way forward for the military.

Then Captain Pacton remembers something. A conversation he had many years ago in Bristol, with a dear friend from the British Armed Forces, about how during the Korean War, the American subjected the communist resistance in China to bloody pox.

 **1987 CE - Saticon Bioindustries HQ, classified location near San Rafael, Marin County, California, USA**

Taken at face value, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, the philosophy of "the preservation of favored races in the struggle to survive", presents an appealing worldview for the laissez faire venture capitalist. The survival of the fittest, the epic tale of alpha males battling against the elements and each other, the seduction of females to be impregnated by voracious sperm, the miracle of birth and the renewal of the cycle. Genotypes, phenotypes as a currency, their products a resource to be commodified, their fates predestined without the need for a god, guided only by the randomly spinning needle of the compass held by the invisible hand of the evolutionary market.

Of course, in recent history, humankind has occupied the niche of the gods, creating beings of a desired image and purpose, and thus altered the alignment of the compass needle.

People have domesticated animals for millennia, enclosing them in paddies and paddocks, sometimes butchering them for their flesh, blood, fruit, milk, and bones, other times sparing their lives for their intimate companionship. Dogs, cats, cows, sheep, goats, horses, donkeys, llamas, buffalo, camels, reindeer, wapiti, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, goldfish, guinea pigs, rats, mice; all have been tamed by human hands, surviving in captivity long after their immediate wild ancestors have gone extinct or become critically endangered. They have been further subdivided into unnatural breeds, with certain morphological and behavioral characteristics desired for specific tasks: hunting, gathering, tracking, pulling, pushing, loving.

The same principles were applied to plants, perhaps earlier than the first domestications of animals. Wheat, rye, rice, barely, maize, potato, tomato, olive, date, grape, banana, apple, pineapple, breadfruit, guava; all can trace their ancestry to a few rare strains selected for cultivation, modified for their taste, their scent, their aesthetic, and their resistance to weeds and parasites.

Darwin called this process "artificial selection". These organisms were still as subject to the laws of natural selection as every other living thing, but their immediate modification, their pedigree, was the result of conscious and supposedly well-educated decisions made by human beings, with an agenda, a mission. In the fascocapitalist West, during the late Industrial Revolution, this process was given a different name when intended for modifying humans themselves: eugenics.

America, a rogue offshoot of the British Empire, pioneered in eugenics policy since its inception, with its ruthlessly calculated extermination of hostile aboriginal tribes, mirroring what would happen late under the Union Jack in Australasia. But it was not until the early 20th century that the scientific means of justifying American exceptionalism, the Manifest Destiny of Western expansion, came into being. New York paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn headlined the early eugenist movement; a staunch supporter of the "physiochemical approach" to social Darwinism, he was a devout and open racist, subdividing humans and other mammals into a taxonomic mess of numerous evolutionary species, with the white Anglo-Saxon as the pinnacle of biological progress.

Then, just as the Nazis began to engulf Europe in the late 1930s, another, unrelated Osborn, Frederick Henry Osborn (also of New York), published "Development of a Eugenic Philosophy" in the _American Sociological Review_ , forever cementing eugenics as the default ideology of imperialist anthropology. Whether it was acknowledged or not in academia or among the populace, it was always there, ominously lurking. The mission to preserve the white race, the enslavement and extermination of less desired races, the preservation of stolen, conquered capital. The defeat of Nazism at the end of WWII was a fluke and a ruse. (After all, many Nazi war criminals such as Wernher von Braun, were taken into the American space program, to combat the much-hyped Soviet threat of Stalin and Khrushchev.). America, along with its allies Britain, Canada, Australia, and possibly the whole of the European Union, was a fascist, eugenist entity worldwide.

The globalized capitalist society of Americanized empire applied eugenics to the entire biosphere from the cell up, white supremacist terraforming on a microbial scale. Genetic engineering and cloning, developed from the principles of Dreisch, Mendel, Punnett, Franklin, Watson, and Crick, was already in full force among Western intelligence agencies by the early 1950s; it just wasn't publicly acknowledged yet, and not just because the science was in its infancy. Its first test if military usefulness was in the Korean War. Chinese and Korean rebels began noticing epidemics from Pyongyang to Manchuria, resembling smallpox but far more resilient than anything their vaccines could guard against. They suspected the Americans to be responsible, yet were immediately dismissed by the international community as liars, hoaxers. But they were dead right. Officials from the US Marine Corps and the World Health Organization, working from a makeshift laboratory in Kyoto, had cultured genetically modified bacteria pathogens - anthrax, tuberculosis, and bubonic plague - to be resistant to antibiotics available to the communist resistance. Nature mastered by man, deployed as weapons of war.

So far, genetic manipulation in the service of eugenics has remained inhuman, applied only to "model organisms", many pests that mankind has tried to exterminate in their natural habitats. Bacteria, protists, algae, cannabis, dandelions, cockroaches, carrion flies, sewer rats. Organisms that are disposable, despised. Organisms that wouldn't raise roars of anger from the plant and animals rights activists, or from the anti-imperialist organic food advocates. But the eugenist mission remains the prime directive. This is leading to something bigger, a global form of social control in the coming computer age, when these methods will be applied to human beings. The preservation of the favored white race in the struggle for more capital. A race that, once perfected, once cleansed, will receive designer plants and animals to make its luxurious lifestyle in fortunate nations even more comfortable, while the third world is poisoned by their crops, hunted down by super-soldiers.

Within the server room of this top secret computer laboratory, a database of "possible threats to American and British interests" guarded from the outside world by barbed wire and security officers with machine guns, is one of the designer organisms purposed for bourgeoisie use. Only four centimeters long, it bares little resemblance to its ancestor, the common vampire bat _Desmodus rotundus_ found throughout tropical Central and South America. It is flightless, only able to parachute across the isles for short distances on small wings with reduced digits and a flimsier membrane. Its has not one hook-clawed wing finger, but two, an opposable thumb-and-finger pair for which it can manipulate objects. It has no eyes, no ears, only a small mouth with needle-sharp incisor to impale infesting rats and mice, as well as to take in processed meat given as a reward for its servitude. The skull is enveloped by a satin black, cubic mechanoreceptor, taking it digitally encoded orders from the control room to put this wire there, or to squeeze this wire through a pinhole, or to get ride of this rodent infestation there. This neural clamp overrides its natural instinct, save its need to eat, drink, and excrete.

And it is sterile, infertile, disposable. Just as Saticon's patented pesticide-producing corn and wheat have terminator seeds to prevent hybridization with wild species (and to make even more money off of third world customers), _Blanops siliconus_ has no future, no destiny of its own, condemned to dwell amongst the plugged and the wired. Its phallic development stunted, its testes or ovaries castrated at birth, it can not reproduce, and it cannot evolve naturally. Its fate is subjected to its creators faith in the invisible hand of the free market. And the needle inside the compass of that hand may change direction without warning. Biotechnology is a chaotic industries of start-ups and dead-ends. Within a few years, perhaps even a few months, the bugbats may prove economically unviable, the profit margins of imperial eugenics located somewhere else. They will become extinct, a footnote in the long saga of genetic experimentation leading up to the new world order.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, ponders BMF instructor Joseph Wilder, visiting from Sandhurst at the invitation of his friend Bruce Pacton, these seemingly insignificant creatures can serve the nation, the world, the order, in ways these Americans entrepreneurs haven't though of yet.

Wilder is no captain or colonel, he doesn't even have that high a rank, but he knows an asset to Her Majesty's army when he sees one. He calls Andover, concerning a potential Yankee import.

His eyes fixate on that neural clamp, its posterior neon red beam flicking, pulsating with the arrival of each new signal, each new command.

 **1990 CE - Guns Island Military Observatory, 322 km southwest of Ardmore, County Waterford, Munster, Ireland**

The British were leaving. That is what the Irish citizens were being told. After forty years of operation, the Guns Island Military Observatory was closing down as part of a cost-cutting measure, giving Île des Guns back to Ireland.

"If only the bloody English would give back fucking Ulster as well", snarks Alson Seamus, as he and his camera crew board the inflatable raft and speed away from the rocky basalt cliffs, swarming with nesting guillemots and gannets.

Though Dublin-born, Seamus lives in London, where he works for London Morning Television's _Evening News_. At this point in their career, a television journalist usually submits to the bondage of the bourgeoisie, the respect for the deep state's authority, even in commercial broadcasting. Seamus isn't that television journalist in any way, shape, or form. He came to LMT to join the ranks of Michael J. Harper, a self-professed "infowarrior", one willing to see through the wool over his eyes, the mastermind behind the curtain puppeteering the wizard.

His early collaborations with Harper have gone well. Their coverage of the Clarke Pence pedophile scandal and the human trafficking coverup at Sandhurst proved primetime ratings gold for Evening News, as the program enjoyed notoriety and popularity not experienced since its unorthodox Vietnam coverage in the early 70s.

But on this trip, Seamus' first solo investigation, a probe into alleged human trafficking possibly connected the Sandhurst incident, he has come up empty handed. Any British military officers worth questioning have already left, relocated to bases elsewhere. No conspiracy to uncover, just a barren mass of Palaeocene volcanic rock sticking out of the Irish Sea. He steers the raft northwest, back towards Muir Cheilteach.

If only he steered northeast to observe a small white motorboat with a barely visible Union Jack bumper sticker zip by them, heading straight for a sea cave on the south side of the island.

 **1993 CE - Oxford University Museum of Natural History, Parks Road, Oxford, Oxfordshire, South East England, England, United Kingdom**

"But you see, Mantell got it wrong. The _Iguanodon_ 's horn was actually its thumb. See? It's that broad spike sticking out of his hand."

Christine was not enjoying this one bit, having to look at all this dead stuff. These bones and skins should still be rotting in the ground where they were buried.

"Wait, is that a _Eustreptospondylus_? It is a _Eustreptospondylus_! Hmm, I didn't expect it to be this…smalll. Though it would be bigger, toothier, like a _T. rex_ or a megalosaur."

She didn't want to be dragging that little brat Claudia Brown through the Dinosaur Gallery. This was her one weekend off, the one weekend where she wasn't bogged down with homework, the one weekend where she could perhaps acquaint her selves with the people she admired most, the distinguished professors leading the emerging Bioinformatics program at Oxford. But no, she was stuck with babysitting as a punishment from her godmother. On the opposite side of the campus, no less.

Well, at least she could visit the Pitts River Wing, if she could get Claudia to settle down. Perhaps to see the Noh mask collection. She's always had an interest in feudal Japanese history.

Christine Johnson had not fared well since her father died. The blast at Dunmurry was a traumatic turning point in her life. Papa wasn't coming home. And no one took that news worse than Dolly, who ended up jumping off the roof of a Belfast orphanage because she felt unloved. With both of her mentors taken away from her, Christine unraveled, threatening to becoming a juvenile delinquent, only finding calm within the storm from reading textbooks.

She was eventually adopted by the Cordorliers, a wealthy real estate family with a number of properties in the south of England, and a number of connections to the intelligence communities at the Home Office and the SAS. Christine has learned to deal with them. They may not be the most attentive parents in the world, or the most caring, but at least they have a world class library accumulated over the last four decades from their travels abroad. She could study their world, plotting how to take it over.

With the Cordorliers' move to Oxford, Christine hopes to become familiar with the most noteworthy academics in all of England, in hopes of bribing her way into university. That is, if she can get over her stupid chores.

Claudia Brown is the younger sister of Christine's friend from boarding school, Terry Brown. She too is a self-taught scholar, a "nerd", but far more annoying than Christine has ever been. She isn't just interested in dinosaurs, she's _obsessed_ with them. She has come out of Spielberg's _Jurassic Park_ a dinomaniac. She will not stop talking about all the different dinosaur groups, all the different places dinosaurs have been found, all the new groundbreaking discoveries by Bob Bakker, Jack Horner, and Nick Cutter. All facts about "the living fossils", the coelacanths, the crocodiles, the cockroaches, that once coexisted with the dinosaurs. How dinosaurs ruled for 160 million years, how dinosaurs care for their young like birds, how dinosaurs evolved into birds.

Christine could care less about this crap. When it came to biology, mounted skeletons and stuffed specimens, branching phylogenetic trees of morphological change didn't interest her. She was interested in cells, in DNA, in bacteria, protists, viruses, the building blocks of life. Forget dinosaurs and their amber-entrapped bloodsucking contemporaries; microbes were the true rulers of the Earth. And now humankind was on the verge of ruling them.

 _Jurassic Park_ was just a kiddie flick, just child's play, compared to the science she wanted to take part in.

 **1995 CE - The Tower, Minerva Hills National Park, near Springsure, Central Highlands Region, Queensland, Australia**

This is not going well at all.

She is not designed for this. Despite her tough, naked, wrinkly hide, she is overheating underneath the blistering sun of the outback. She was born, engineered, trained for the darkness of the underworld, not the blinding light of the desert.

But at least she was free at last, free at last.

She is still overwhelmed by the memories of her past life, in the world underneath the outback. The gloominess, the somberness. The barbed wire, the electric fences, the concrete walls, the security lasers. The sounds of her seemingly eternal imprisonments, the shouting, the screaming, the beatings.

 _Sit. Stay. Good girl. Fetch this. Chase this. That's it, tear it like you mean it. No, that is bad! Go hide! Bad girl!_

She experienced this cruel world mainly through what she heard, what she smelled, what she tasted, in all of its felonous, wicked repugnancy. She has eyes, but very weak eyes, little more than slits where the sockets where, squished by the enormous width of her ears and her single nasal hole. Her vision is limited to shades of black and wide, punctuated every so often by sinuous, undulating vibrations of sound, illuminated by a touch of red and yellow, the technicolor movement of blood or the beating of a heart.

In the bunker, she could see the coldness of her handler's heart, the lack of empathy, compassion.

 _Fetch this. Chase this. That's it, No. B09, tear it like you mean it. Beat the shit out of this fucking Muslim traitor. Live like a goddamn warrior._

 _And remember, **obey my voice. Obey the Pact**_

But she didn't want to be a warrior. She hated it. She hated him, she hated all of them. She didn't want to be like them. She didn't want to live like this, indiscriminately killing innocent people kidnapped from their Middle Eastern homeland, shackled to the cel walls as bait.

Fuck the Pact.

That is in her past now. Her handler was dead, and his handlers, and their handlers as well. Everyone in that godforsaken cavernous bunker was dead and devoured, nothing left but dry bones buried deep underground, where no other men or women tread. The sole operative at the training facility courageous enough to follow here to the surface and face her at Long Lagoon was quickly mauled by No. B12, her accomplice and companion. Sadly, he too died at that spot, from the many bullets embedded on his side.

She should have stayed with him. She was so inexcusably selfish, she left him to die to quench her thirst, having not drank since they broke out of the cel. How could she do that to him? They were the only two beings in the world that understood each other. She liked him, she loved him.

But that is also in her past now. He is gone, and that's that. Now she has to figure out how to survive on her own, all while evading capture, all while dealing with sounds and scents she has been educated to cope with.

Heading northwestwards from the town over the course of the early morning, she has set up camp on a rocky plateau overlooking the acacia woodland of the valley. The sparsity of dichanthium, casuarina, and cadellia does not provide ample cover from precipitation or predators, but it will have to do for now, until she has the energy to migrate deeper into the scrub forest at higher elevations, away from the village lights. She doesn't have the energy to do so, though, and it is way too hot. Like most creatures of the outback, she will sit out the midday heatwave, awaiting dusk, when there is only a ghost of chance of detection by lost hikers. (The park she has chosen to stay at has a large green sign with clear white lettering reading, "NO CAMPING".)

Then she sense something on the moves. Little twitches and scratches. Little ripples of sound, first uneven white scratches, then becoming more ovoid, more curved over time to reveal the thumping and pumping of little beating hearts hopping up and down the barren face of the inselberg. They are bipeds, but not humans. They have short, woolly, plump bodies, hunched over, sniffing the herbs growing along the crevices. Their arms and hands stubby and chubby, their hind legs long and muscular, their tails narrow and pointed. Their scent musky, but at the same time seductive, enticing, inviting her to come closer. These must be animals. And they are heading her way. They are within an arm's reach.

Food! Glorious food!

She doesn't even have to burst out in an ambush. In a flash, with one swipe of her didactyl paw, she grabs a subadult rock-wallaby and drags it into her encampment, a little hole at the side of the mountain. She takes a bite and loves it. Entranced by this newfound delicacy, she digs deeper, tearing into the carcass, tearing like she means it.


	5. Act I, Scene 3

**ACT I, SCENE 3**

 **2006 CE - Home Office Building, Marsham Street, Westminster, London, England, United Kingdom**

" _The creature's autopsy proves beyond any doubt that it was definitely a male," states Connor Temple, shortly after receiving his call from the coroner._

 _Stephen Hart shakes his head in disbelief. "It's got to be a female, it was nurturing its young."_

" _Maybe in that species that's a job for the boys."_

" _It better be."_

 _Abby Maitland stands frozen, shocked, wide-eyed. She knew what Stephen is about to say next._

" _If not, it means the mother's still out there."_

 _Connor's eyes turn to the DS40 sitting on a metal foldable table. The oscilloscopic pings keep coming, intensifying in both frequency and amplitude._

 _The mother is here. But where?_

 _Then, without warning, a rustling in the bracken ferns. A kick, a spring, a ting. She has gone through the anomaly so suddenly, Connor, Abby, or Stephen only take notice at the last second, with puzzled looks on their faces._

" _What happened?" demands Claudia Brown, as she leads the SAS forces to the scene of the happening._

" _Not sure," says Connor._

" _Did you see something?"_

" _Nothing," says Stephen._

" _Is it getting weaker?"_

" _No, no chance," Connor observes, using his watch as a magneto-barometer for the anomaly. Claudia doesn't find much comfort in his readings. Nick, Helen, and Ryan are on the other side, and the mother predator was sure to catch up to them._

 _And something i_ s _changing._

 _The shining pupil-like "eye" of the anomaly starts to dilate, its shards expanding. Connor feels an ever increasing tug, a magnetic pull on the watch._

" _Connor, watch out!"_

 _Claudia pushes Connor out of the way, onto the pine-needle laden forest floor. Stephen ducks, shielding Abby with his arms. The anomaly misses its target._

 _The SAS troopers start firing shell after shell at the anomaly, but their efforts are futile; the rounds simply go through the time warp into the Permian abyss. It keeps rambunctiously convulsing. It attacks again, a stream of sharp-tipped shards reaching out at a soldier, impaling him and dragging him into its mouth, like an octopus tentacle holding a strolling crab or fish. Another shot, another victim._

" _What the hell is happening!" screams Connor, absolutely mortified._

 _Claudia took a quick glance up. "It's shrinking again! The anomaly's getting weaker!"_

 _And then it was gone, in a literal flash. The carnage is over._

 _Claudia and Connor get back up on their feet. Abby and Stephen have taken shelter behind a stack of SAS quarantine containers._

 _She runs back towards the vans to find Lester. She finds him curled up in a tight ball amidst the ferns, behind a decaying pine snag struck by the anomaly's lightning bolt, pissing himself. It is the first time she had ever seen him cry like a little toddler._

 _And it was the last time she would ever see Nick Cutter._

"You're in charge."

"What?"

"You're in charge, Ms. Brown," explains Sir James Lester. "Provisionally, until the Minister can confirm your appointment is permanent."

"Are you sure you want me take over?" asks Claudia.

"If I wasn't, I wouldn't ask."

"Let me guess, you're not…man enough for the job."

Lester isn't impressed with Claudia's attempt at snark. Then again, he is never impressed with other people's jokes, only his only. And Claudia never really found Lester's 'biting satire' impressive anyway. In that regard, they're even.

Lester exhales a long sigh, his fists clenched on the the metal rails of the balcony on the third floor lobby.

"If what we saw in the Forest in Dean is an indication," he continues, "it's that we are up against a threat unparalleled in the history of mankind. Remember what I told you. Once day, an anomaly's going to open up, and millions of those goddamn savages are going to pour throw. Not mention the anomalies are a top predator in their own right, and I have killed two of best men. And we haven't got the slightest bloody clue of what they are, where they're from, and why they appear. And on top of that, the two people who could have figured it out are stuck god knows how many millions of years in the past."

"Two hundred and fifty."

Lester turns his head. Claudia mutters, "Its…two hundred and fifty million…years…"

"Doesn't matter," he snaps. "They're trapped, we can't get to them, and there's nothing we can do but contain the threat."

The atmosphere within Mission Chronus is beyond hectic. Three and a half months since its inception in response to the first Forest of Dean incident, and it already reached a devastating setback. It was as if Helen Cutter had brought bad luck onto everyone her lives touched. They shouldn't have trusted here, they should have her up in solitude at the supermax in the basement, interrogating her until she gave her more straightforward information than "saber-toothed killers in central London".

In the cubicles of the HO, the air is rife with the buzzing, rigging cacophony of speed dials and voice mails. Everyone is put on high alert. Wanted posters of Helen Cutter are already being sent to police stations all across the south of England, in case she will emerge from another anomaly somewhere, in case she was the mastermind behind all of this.

Claudia thoughts turn to Nick. She hasn't spoken much since the attack happened five days ago, her fragile mind tormented by random, unexplained visions of rampaging gorgonopids, pareiasaurs, and therocephalians.

And anomalies. Anomalies that mol to the curves of her body, obscuring her completion, almost as if they are about to swallow her up.

Those visions weren't as random as they first seemed. Perhaps they were warnings.

If only she could talk to Nick, to find comfort in him. All she disclosed was some "bad dreams", and a few instances of fatigue and dizziness. She should have told him more, among all the other things she forgot to tell him..

She didn't even say she loved him when they kissed.

Lester keeps yapping in the background, but only now does Claudia return to terra firma. "You job's to to come up with cover stories. If anything else gets out about these creatures, these phenomena, it will cause mass panic across the nation, perhaps across the world. And worse still, if it goes public in any way, shape, and form, it could be utilized by any and all enemies to Her Majesty's government. Al-Quaeda, the IRA, the cartels. People who want to cause harm for their benefit. Your job is to predict and contain the threat. In essence, that means convincing people they didn't see what they actually did…"

"We need to tell them," Claudia counters. A shot of adrenaline, of confidence rushes through her veins, her concern more firmly expressed. "People need to know. Maybe there are menacing people out there who would take advantage of the creatures and the anomalies, but there's also a lot of good people. Decent people, ordinary people. People we've dealt with, people who've already lost their loved ones. And your solution is to shut them in dark with wool over their eyes?"

"Keeping this secret is the government's top priority."

"Cutter wouldn't approve."

"He's gone. He's doesn't need to approve."

Claudia struggles to maintain composure. Now she was just infuriated with Lester. And unfortunately for her, he can tell.

"Look, I get it, you have a lot on your shoulder," he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. "You need to stay calm. Keep things calm, controlled, and you can manage it, slightly dull. And don't expect a pay raise."

He then strolls Bond-like and professional back towards his office, leaving Claudia to ponder the seemingly unbearable weight of her new responsibility. The entire fate of the world on her shoulders.

She has always loved the big picture, she loved science and nature as child and still does, but in secondary school she wasn't as good with numbers and equations as she had hoped. Christine got her an entry-level job in government PR, from which she worked up the ranks. She still a little minnow in a big pond, though, and she doesn't like the bass that threaten to swallow her whole. Her job revolves around the very thing she hates most in this world: attempting to appeal to corrupt aristocrats and bureaucrats. If it wasn't for her importance to Mission Chronus, she could quit her job and sail freely around the world, retracing the routes of Magellan and Darwin.

" _Highly unprofessional."_

" _Stuff professionalism."_

She feels a swift, fluttering tippity-tap on her shoulder. It's Connor.

"Feeling okay?"

She doesn't respond immediately. She's still thinking about Nick.

"I miss him," she admits, and starts to tear up. "I'm not ready for this."

Connor gives her a big hug, as big a hug as Nick did when Duncan passed away right in front of him, prompting him to nearly quit the project.

"It's okay, we all miss him. But we're going to get back. Maybe not now, but someday. We'll get him back."

She feels reassured. At least someone is following in Nick's footsteps, and of all people it's the goofy _Star Wars_ nerd with a fedora.

 **2007 CE - Barikju, near Kajaki, Helmand Province, Afghanistan.**

They are without a father. They are without a home.

Armala doesn't trust the newcomers, the British and the Americans. Thugs with guns, they are no better than the Taliban. Pulling, dragging innocent, unsuspecting men, women, and children out of bed and out of their houses, clearing the rooms with noxious gas, all in the name of "checkups" and "neutralizing". It was all in the name of "freedom", "liberty", "justice.". A gift from God, from "the land of the free".

Whatever God the Yankees and the Tories have, it isn't Armala's Allah. It is a trickster, a liar. It's angels are really demons, and they are not here to removed the Taliban. They are here to create hell on Earth.

The last month had witnessed a barrage of fire, "Operation Volcano", the Westerners called it. Armala had never seen an active volcano in person, only in pictures and maybe once on the village television, but she knew when they went boom, they went _boom_. And this was quite an eruption. A immense flow, torrent of troops dropped from helicopters, consisting of hundreds of well-armed white solders, 8,000 of them to be precise. They claimed to be planning a removal of the local Taliban forces, like an exterminator plotting the removal of pests.

So why did they, the innocent people of Afghanistan, have to suffer?

On a dark and stormy night, the Tories received fire from Taliban in the nearby village of Chinah. Armala's husband, Takhtaf, was in Chinas that same night, visiting a dear old friend. He never came back.

Why did he leave without saying goodbye? Or was he taken away from her against his will?

The next morning, Barikju was bombarded by drones and mortars. Armala's brick qalla was obliterated. It took her all day to excavate her twin daughters Qazahia and Tumula out of the rubble and shapnel, and to get them to the nearest hospital in Kajaki.

At least the Yankees and Tories didn't try bombing the dam like they did several years back. Without that damn on the Helmand, a relict of a bygone era of Zahir Shah and Morrison-Knudsen, they would have no food, no electricity, no life. It's only a matter of time before it gets bombed, too. After all, everything is crumbling, tumbling down all along the Helmand, the statues, the monuments, the buildings, the governments.

And now her family. Her daughters are without a father and a home.

They are taking up temporary residence in a makeshift ten, in the backyard of their next door neighbor Jayid. There is not much for all of them to go on, though, save for stale naan-e and yogurt, well past its expiration. Enough for them to cling on for the next two weeks, but not much longer.

She is afraid of going underground, of using the tunnels beneath Barikju to lead her daughters to safety, to their grandparents in Kajaki, all while avoiding the bombastic artillery and the resulting nocturnal carnage.

Nowhere is safe. She has heard too many rumors since the "Volcano" began erupting. People taking refuge in the tunnels, and never to be seen or heard from again. Full grown men, strong enough and grave enough to take on even well armed militants, found dead in the gutters and the drains, beaten, bruised, buttered, sometimes even gnawed all the way down to the bones. Things Taliban do not normally do; even in their state of barbarity, cannibalism is against their religion, their moral code, as with any follower of Islam.

Then there are witnesses who have survived their endeavors in the tunnels. Their reports are mention a common motif: a bright flashing red light, making a pinging sound, flashing and pinging more and more as it approaches its target. Another light glowing behind it, snow white and blinding, sometimes reaching out. A complicated drone of some sort, probably on the side of the Yankees and Tories, who could be piloting them through the gloom.

If only they would go simple leave, vanish, let the people of Barikju and all of Afghanistan be. Let them take on the Taliban on their own.

It is dusk. Armala tucks Qazahia and Tumula to sleep in crocheted wool blankets, as she gazes upon an old photograph of her late mother Alamal, one of the few belongings remaining from her destroyed qalla. She still remembers the bond they shared when she was a little girl, when she born into the reign of the DRA. The good times, the promising time, when Afghans were truly free, when they had Moscow on their side. Two decades later, all has changed. The Soviets are no more. The Yankees and Tories, and all their contras, have won out, and are spilling innocent blood all across this land, and the lands to west.

She is disgusted by these pugnacious, rapacious foreigners. They took away her husband. They took away her home.

 **2009 CE - High Street, Southam, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, West Midlands, England, United Kingdom**

 _YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN_

 _YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN_

 _YOU'VE GOT TO MAKE IT HAPPEN_

 _RIGHT NOW_

Abby and Connor are drunk. And not just drunk, but _drunk._ Ridiculously drunk, giggling and giggling, sweating profusely, latched on to one another as they threaten to trip off the stage. Such is the motto at the Carthusian-themed karaoke bar: " _Le Gobelet de Chartreuse_ , drunk as a monk getting dunked".

Drink had lead to the angel as well as the devil, Claudia surmises, and for the better. Abby and Connor had not been getting along recently, ever since they moved into a new flat for what seemed like the millionth time in the last two years since Cutter's disappearance. (Greater London landlords have little tolerance for herptophilic tenants, it seems.). They had been dating on and off throughout that interval, but never really solidified a working partnership. Friends with benefits, but without many benefits to speak of. And for a long while, there was no chance of Cupid's arrow hitting both targets, not after Abby kicked out Connor's other sort-of-girlfriend, Caroline Steel, for nearly poisoning Rex with the wrong brand of lizard chow. Caroline had issues.

More recently, another fight happened. Claudia doesn't know exactly what happened, nor does she want to know the whole story, but she's allowing Connor to crash on her sofa for the time being, until he can pull off a Lloyd Dobler move or something. He hasn't been speaking to Abby at the ARC (Anomaly Research Center), keeping to himself while fixing a broken electromagnotometer in the anomaly detector over the past week.

Yet now, a few glasses of Maury later, they're friendlier than they'v been to each other. Drunk, intoxicated, but nonetheless friendly. Maybe they can make it happen.

If only Claudia could make something happen too.

They're stationed not far from a potential anomaly hotspot, the abandoned Brooks Mansion on the outskirts of South en route to Wellesbourne. No direct evidence for an incursion, not even the confirmed signature of an anomaly fault line, just a bizarre missing persons report filed by the Warwickshire Constabulary in 1995 regarding two teenagers who disappeared: Patrick Quinn and John Mortimer. Ryan Mason, the only surviving witness, said they may have been murdered, and even described the prime suspect. It was humanoid, but not human. Large ears, large eyes, large teeth. Able to change shape, color, texture, even voice instantaneously, like some elf or fairy of Celtic myth, or a alien UFO pilot of science fiction. Patrick's older brother Danny denied the allegations, even going as far as framing Ryan as the true culprit. Yet the story of the Brooks killer lingered on in the collective memory of the Southam townsfolk. Some even believed it was what drove out the original owners of the mansion in the early 1970s.

Connor thought the had connected the dots. After the British Museum incident with the panzer-croc and the Sun Cage, he realized that the anomalies were the key to demystifying cryptozoology, to making it a legit science. Sure, Bigfoot, Chupacabra, and Nessie were fabrications, hoaxes, psyops maybe, but other creatures deemed mythical or imaginary - the Babylonian sirush, the Chinese fenghuang and qilin, Herodotus' winged snakes - creatures with immense cultural significance and immensely detailed natural histories recorded over millennia, may have been real flesh-and-blood animals lost in time. Perhaps prehistoric species that haven't turned up in the fossil record yet, or perhaps species that haven't evolved yet (like the future predators, which have become ever more elsuive since the last excursion in the Forest of Dean). In any case, wherever there was a sighting, a myth, something inexplicable and unexplained, there was an anomaly. The Quinn-Mortimer case was recent enough, and Mason's description detailed enough, that it was overdue for serious scientific scrutiny by the ARC.

They are way outside the Greater London hotspot for anomaly activity, but then again that very first Forest of Dean anomaly was also outside those bounds, almost to Bristol really. Claudia is thankful the forest is over a two hour drive away. She does not want to go back there. Here nightmares have largely subsided, and there have been no observed cases of predatory anomalies since then. But there is still an omnipresent fear of the place, of the possibility.

 _If anything else gets out about these creatures, these phenomena, it will cause mass panic across the nation, perhaps across the world._

She still misses Cutter. Abby and Connor miss Cutter too. Stephen hasn't handled the professor's absence well either; he's no longer works for the Home Office, having resigned over a year ago after he broke up with Valerie, allegedly to do "fieldwork" in the Kurdish regions of Armenia. Mission Chronus' operations have expanded with the establishment of the ARC in Bromley, but the original team is a vestige of its former shelf, a tiny island surrounded by a genomic ocean of bureaucrats and technocrats.

Perhaps it's the prospect of Cutter returning that keeps Claudia staying put, not abandoning her post, but at this point her nostalgia is based solely on the memory of the noble Scotsman, divorced from his true form.

 _There he is, at the bar. This could be her chance._

 _She is becoming exceedingly annoyed with Lyle. He just keeps blabbing on and on, in a vain attempt to keep her interested. His words mean nothing to her_

" _I must admit though, I've never seen you around here myself. And hey, why don't we have a drink afterwards? I would love to…"_

 _Her eyes are fixated on Professor Cutter…_

"Excuse me."

Claudia, startled, abruptly turned around in her booth at the back of the bar, nearly spilling her glass of yellow chartreuse. A satin black figure, seemingly out of nowhere, sits opposite her, cloaked in a velvety trench coat, topped with a wool 1920s safari Stetson reminiscent of something Indian Jones would wear. No face is visible, nor is any naked skin on the arms, for the figure has stretched turtleskin sleeves seething unusually womanly hands for a bearer of a croaky masculine rasp. A small figure, less than a meter and quarter in height, but incredibly intimidating.

"Don't panic," he says, reaching to his aluminum can of spicy pear shandy. "I just told off some sleazy Hooters type that you were my wife, and that we out out to dinner. Drink certainly leads to the devil in these parts, doesn't it?"

Claudia is stunned. This is just like here first conversation with Cutter. This can't be real, this is too good to be true.

This is one of those setups, isn't it.

"Well, um, glad I could help," she awkwardly bumbled, hesitantly sticking out her open hand. "My, um…my name is Claudia Brown, I…"

"You were at the mansion earlier today, were you?"

Now she is paralyzed. He knows way too much.

"And…how do you know that? Oh dear god, did that asshole Mick Harper send you after us?" Her hand slowly slides toward the Webley Stinger hidden in her back jean pocket.

"No, it was Emily, the little Merchant girl next door. Watching over my place, as usual, saw three Londoner murder tourist break past the boards. Tried to warn the bearded nerd, but he didn't listen, he kept snooping around the place with his blondie." He paused to take a sip from his can. "The Merchants are a wonderful bunch of chaps. Still won't listen when I tell them to stop giving me Kosher, though. For the millionth, billionth time, I want cracovia or ogórek. The Polish know how to make good pickles."

Certainly an educated fellow, especially for one squatting in a dilapidated house deemed too deteriorated for sale.

"The name's Gremm, Gremm Striker." Claudia shakes his hand out of respect, but reluctantly. Something literally doesn't feel right. The feeling of long sharp fingernails underneath the arm sleeves, much more grotesque than any human nails.

"Alright," she exhales, "since you…know an awful lot about that place, let me ask you something. Do you a certain Patrick Quinn and John Morti-"

"If you're looking for the killer, don't bother. He's dead. He shot himself a long time ago."

He tries to compose himself underneath the curtain of attire, to keep from breaking down.

"My brother, Skarn, he didn't last long. I thought extracting the chip would solve everything like it did for me, but he kept spiraling downward. I found face on the floor, blood splattered everywhere, a old ČZ vz. 27 in his hand."

Claudia is ever more confused. This being, so weird and unnatural, yet so human.

"The Merchants understood what really happened, what we were subjected to. That those two boys…It was an accident, Skarn wasn't supposed to do anything like that, even with the chip. They promised to keep it a secret, to not tell the police. But it hurts. It hurts not be a part of the rest of the world. I have nowhere to go. The Merchants tell me the gateway might not open for another century."

"You…mention this…'chip'," Claudia inquires. "What do you mean by that, that you and your brother had it?"

In a fit of nervousness, Gremm gulps. He is just as scared as Claudia. His hands are shaking.

"Before we came here, to this world…we had masters, men. 'Cleaners', the Yantarists called them. We were treated as nothing more than animals, slaves even. The chip was how they maintained dominion over us, managed our obedience. It overrides any and all natural instincts. Whoever they said to kill, we killed, but only who they said. They weren't supposed to glitch, but -"

"Where was this chip?"

"In the neck, about the base of the skull. It still hurts there. I often feel searing pain."

"Show me."

Upon Claudia's request, Gremm removes his hat and his sleeves, revealing…nothing at first. The head and hands are invisible, like a headless horseman, a ghost in the shell of the trench coat But slowly, the crinkles of skin come into view, and a being of the flesh emerges.

Claudia realization is horrifying: Gremm matches Ryan Mason's account:

 _Not like an animal, not like a person, but like a demon. Long wide ears. Bright golden eyes, light as the sun, yet with pupils black as night. A grimacing smile full of needle sharp teeth, like a mouth full of knives. Long spindly arms, long fingers, long claws._

It's a creature. It came through the anomaly.

But some aspects of Gremm don't match the account. His right ear is clipped at the anthelia, like a long crop on a Doberman, but unfashionably, as if it was done as a punishment, to do harm. Only one eye remains; in the place of the other is a round empty socket lined with scabby skin, as if it had been gouged out. His wrists had numerous parallel scars as if someone had attempted to butchered him, to skin him alive.

Claudia was heartbroken, her palms shielding her gasp. This poor soul has had a hard life, in his anguish, in his depression.

"What happened?"

"Skarn and I got into a fight. It was a few days before his suicide, a year after the boys disappeared, I think He got mad that we would never find a way out, now that the gateway had closed, so he turned on me. He thought I was to blame for all of this. So he tore my ears, took away my eye. Then in remorse, in regret, he took his own life. I though of taking mine today, there was no reason for me to keep living. But Emily's mother found me half-dead in the living room of the mansion. They saved my life. They're the reason I've chosen to stay here."

Claudia goes around to Gremm's side of the booth, putting her arms around him. She wipes the tears from his remaining eye, as he reaches into a pocket on his trench coat.

"This is all I have of him," he explains, putting the device on the table next to his can. "This is his chip. I extracted it myself. It was difficult, I only had a screwdriver I found in the basement, and without the Cleaner's proper tools I could have killed him on the spot."

"Who are these Cleaners?" asks Claudia.

"Mercenaries, soldiers, in the world I come from. Lackies and servants of the British exiles in America. Bloodthirsty thugs. They're plotting to take back Britain from the Yantarists, and all the communist nations springing up in the Levant, and the Caucaus region too. Working from bunkers owned by the ARC."

"The ARC?"

"Anomaly Reclamation Clinic. One of their many anti-communist militias under the command of Supreme General Johnson. They created my ilk to hunt down people in 'degenerate' regions that had 'stolen' imperial land. We were the chosen ones after the predators switched sides, became their guardians, their pack animals. They made us out of lemurs and bush babies acquired from the East Indian pet trade, a frequent avenue for bourgeoise black marketing. Then merged us with the genes of squid, and of the Cleaners."

 _ARC. Johnson. Predators._

This can't be real, thought Claudia. But what if it is?

"But we will resist, we will rebel. I have faith. We will be recognized. We will not be silenced."

 **2011 CE - Counterintelligence Optioning Project (COP) laboratory, classified location near Englefield Green, Runnymede, Surrey, England, United Kingdom**

 _Prospero: We_ are _the future._

In the name of the future, don't fuck anything up, thinks Christine Johnson, as the last of the neurosurgeons enters the corridor leading to the main glass-encased operation room.

Philip Burton is a very clever, powerful, and ambitious businessman, one that does not like mistakes, particularly mistakes that lose him employees or money. He's not coming down to the actual laboratories in the concrete reinforced basement today, and it is Johnson's duty to keep that way. He needs to remain at that gala, at that presentation, courted by the COP's best and brightest, until she can attend it herself, once done with all the dirty work. If anything were to make to the surface at disrupt anything, she's done for. And especially since this very building, not far from Burton's childhood home, is in fact the site of the first Prospero offices, before he sold it to the military and moved to its new locations in London and Salford.

Times are desperate, and so are actions. They need to control the soldiers and harness their power, their potential, right now. Johnson has already seen the worst case scenario, the Isla Nublar situation where one single minute malfunction leads to the whole system collapsing. A year and a half ago, in the Wiltshire facility, when the security apparatus went down due to a cyberhack, the soldiers-in-training went berserk without the and attacked an inspecting Home Office official, Oliver Leek, as well as three of his security guards, gnawing all the way to the bone. All of the animals had to be put down, and the entire bunker downgraded to decoy site before finally being decommissioned, to contain any leaks. Not Johnson's best day. It was the most devastating incident of its kind since the Long Lagoon happening fifteen years earlier; there were no known survivors, human or animal, in that tragedy, just isolated unconfirmed reports of an "Australian chupacabra" shot in the vicinity of Minerva Hills National Park.

At least she has Captain Wilder to back her up. He has always seen her strength, her cunning, her endurance. Eleven years ago, he handpicked her out of the Oxford biology program to become part of MI6's initial research into biotechnological defense, the predecessor of the COP project. Despite the setbacks, he has remained her guardian and mentor, something of a father figure. Yet he is also willing to let her take charge when necessary.

"Ma'am, it's about the Wiltshire incident," he says, handing her a file as they walked down toward the operation room.

Johnson doesn't even start reading the whole report. Only three letters catch her attention.

I.R.A.

 _I don't know what to do, Dolly. Papa's not coming home._

"You sure about this?!" barks Johnson, her temper flaring, her face turning red.

"Don't know," admits Wilder. "When the Belfast authorities tried to intercept the alleged source of the attack in Lisburn, they found a burned down shack. No computers recovered, just this bizarre artifact." He pointed to a photo of a bronze-plated hexagonal prism, slitted at both ends, with an engraving "65359". "Said to have high traces of radioactive cesium, for some reason. But when Scotland Yard came to retrieve it, it was gone from the police station. It might have been stolen, sold on the black market."

"It might not," sneers Johnson. "My whole future could depend on this. If anyone finds it, I want it. Understand."

"Yes, ma'am."

Breathing heavily, Johnson struggles to regain control. The pair now gazes upon the operation room, the so-called Sweatbox, separated from their subordinates by a plane of bulletproof glass.

"All set?" shouts Wilder through the intercom.

One of the surgeons, Yusef, gives Johnson and Wilder a big thumbs up, before he and his colleagues proceed work.

The patient on the table is a cadet, No. YK-653, a subadult male about six years old, just finishing his conditioning. His naked head is globular and heavily booed, particularly about the frontal and ventral portions toward the skullcap. His eyes are minute, obscured by cerebral folds; he usually sees only black and grey, illuminated by vibratory pulses of sound from the large melon organ above its nasal hole or from its surroundings. His front paws have two sickle-clawed fingers, curved at about the pip joint (in his containment cell, he walks and runs on his knuckles to protect his natural weapons). His back paws have three toes and also contain sickle-shaped claws. On his back, especially about his shoulder, is a muscular hump, lined with five rows backward-curving spines made of matted rhino-like keratin, including a major spinal row trailing all the way to his short, spur-tailed tai. In Johnson and Wilder's eyes, he is a perfect specimen.

YK-653 is not the first of his kind, or the largest or the fastest or the strongest or the most intelligent, but he is of the only surviving type, the most practical one. The process of his creation can be traced back to the early 1980s on the American West Coast, during the modernization of Silicon Valley and the countercultural movement into a more refined weapon of governmental defense, a more efficient and subversive successor the CIA and FBI's MKUltra and COINTELPRO. A prime focus of this movement was the merger of organic and mechanical life into profitable tools, experimented through genetically modified, selectively bred animal test subjects. Yet these early prototypes of cyborgic synergy, the gliding bugbats hunting rogue lab rats in the server rooms, couldn't reproduce naturally, a precaution taken by the engineers were they to escape into the wild; they had to be synthesized from scratch in the embryonic stage one at a time. Eventually, the bugbats came under the possession of the British Armed Forces and its associated organizations, who saw their potential as efficient bioweaponry, more useful in remote outposts than drones or tanks. The goal was to get them to reproduce, to inherit their bestowed genotypes, so that the only artificial aspect of manufacturing would be neural clamp installation upon sexual maturity. This was accomplished a decade ago, when the first naturally conceived and gestated pups were born at the Sandhurst bunker, and ever since the new predators, _Blanops predatorius technologicus_ , have had an evolutionary advantage over their sterile bugbat "ancestors" in Silicon Valley and Long Lagoon. They are already stationed for military use in small numbers throughout battlezones in the Middle East, executing neutralization surveys in sparsely populated areas suspected of harboring extremist holdouts.

On one of the metal rolling utility tables is a new and improved neural clamped, intended to prevent future incidents like the Wiltshire massacre that killed Oliver Leek and his men. Seven centimeters wide and four centimeters tall, its base contains four metal-capped spiked electrodes, its back side two tubular black nodes; all connect to the central nervous system via the animal's parietal and occipital lobe, which control the sensory organs. The orange LED light, shining through four slit-like bands on the central dorsal disk, only works as a bright flashlight when necessarily, instead of flashing when the wearer closes in on a target like earlier models; more often, it is on low power, signifying only that its functioning. Energy is derived from the soldier's food intake, so the only way it will lose power is if the wearer starves to death, insuring that it is always under direct control of encrypted digital signals from the handler.

In all, this is the future of military weaponry. That is, if the surgeon's can successfully install it.

"It's amazing," comments Johnson, as Yusef began to incisive his scalpel across YK-653's skullcap. "Now we understand them, we know how to control them."

Or maybe not.

YK-653's arms twitch, then spasm. Mysteriously, the domitor analgesic hasn't quite worked to full effect this time. Usually, it puts him in a peaceful, torpor-like state.

Not today.

"Get out there now!" screams Wilder.

Yusef and the other surgeons know the drill. They evacuate the operation room immediately, dropping their scalpels. The creature stirs. He is not quite awake yet, but as he flails his arms around his in his untimely sleepwalk, he knocks over his bed and all of the utility tables.

The new neural clamp model is smashed in the process. It will take a long time to manufacture another testable prototype to replace it.

As he regains consciousness, YK-653 presses against the glass, facing Johnson and Wilder. At first, he threatens to smash through, but as his actions becomes less spastic and erratic. He recognizes a familiar sound.

The firm, persistent, yet strangely gentle thumping of Johnson and Wilder's hearts.

 _Mother. Father._

Of course, he has a real biological mother, but he hasn't heard her, smelled her since he was weaned, and taken from the Wiltshire bunker by Johnson for training at this laboratory. These human masters have been his parental guardians since then.

 _ **Obey my voice**_ , he remembers. _**Obey the pact. My voice, my pact, is the only one you recognize.**_

He cowers on all fours, his head dipped down, his stubby tail curved between his hind legs, like a wolf expressing regret for challenging the alpha female of the pack.

His has disobeyed his mother, and in the worst manner possible.

Johnson looks on, utterly surprised. This has never happened before. Maybe she will tell this to Burton when she heads upstairs to the gala.

Perhaps they won't need the clamps. Maybe these soldiers have been engineered, conditioned, domesticated enough to require intensive training, and nothing else. The Pact maybe enough.

Or maybe this is a fluke.

"Tell development to build another model," she orders Wilder. They'll still need a way to fully control their soldiers' actions.

 **2014 CE - The Clock Tower Apartments, Westminster, West End, London, England, United Kingdom**

"We don't know if its the same anomaly, but we can't be too sure!"

Even through the HT, Claudia can tell Captain Hilary Becker was distressed. They have reason to be wary. If he is right, they already encountered this anomaly five years ago, when it claimed the life of Sir Richard Bentley.

The spores of an infectious fungus, like a _Cordyceps_ on steroids, were transferred to Bentley by his assistant Lloyd, while he was purveying the art collection is his flat. Claudia, Abby, and Connor tried to save the two of them at the ARC, but it was too late. Gremm knew the only humane thing to do was to freeze them, and let them pass on in peace. Through his intel, the ARC gathered that the fungus was engineered in the future by the Cleaners' masters, as a weapon of war, to applied against warring armies of predators on tropical battlefields. A sample of spores would be delivered on an suspecting predator, who spread it to the rest of the troop. The resulting "zombies" would carry on the disease to every other animal in the environment until the fungus could no longer derive energy from the host's flesh, and died of starvation.

If anything like this were to reach epidemic proportions in the twenty-first century, it would destroy half of London.

Claudia, Abby, Connor, and Jessica Parker leap out of the steel grey ARC-branded Toyota Hilux as they pulled into the apartment parking garage, grabbing the large tranquilizer pistols and ice throwers from the truckbed. As is the routine, Gremm is the last to leave, locking up the vehicle manually before becoming invisible, running outside and stealthily taking a shortcut along the side of the building, while the rest of the gang met up with Captain Becker at the elevators.

But something isn't right. The handheld ADD on Gremm's field belt (cloaked, as is the rest of his attire) isn't pinging anymore. Perhaps the anomaly has already closed. In which case, if a killer fungus or any other organism came through, there is no way of sending it back to its natural habitat.

Meanwhile, in the elevator, Connor comes to the same conclusion. The others star at his ADD morbidly.

As the elevator doors open to the lobby on the eleventh level, Becker leads the way "We have to hurry! Go!" All five of them rush toward the apartment in question, No. 359, Richard Bentley's former luxury condo.

Becker, weapon in hand, knocks on the door. "This is the SAS. There is an emergency in the area, and we need to conduct a search."

A long pause. No one at the door. Becker is about to bust down by brute force.

Then a screech. And the unexpected sight of Gremm being flung onto Becker's iron-hard chest by a rather distraught, unpleasant-looking American with a blackish-brown mustache-goatee duo, smothered in salmon-flavored cream cheese and Russian caviar while a nearly finished Cuban cigar just out of his mouth, and unwashed technicolor Che Guevara pajama slacks.

"I found it," creaks Gremm, as he got back on his own two feet against Becker's body. "I found the creature that came through the anomaly…"

"Do you want me to bust your other eye, Mr. Batboy?" yells the disgruntled hipster, unimpressed with Gremm's sarcasm, his red hot middle poker pointed at all of them. "And what the fuck y'all doing breaking into my place, assholes I don't even fucking know!"

"That's enough!" screams Claudia, putting her foot forward and literally confronting the man head on. "Now, as officers of Her Majesty's government -"

"Hey, do I look like I give a shit for you peppy Tory solider boy types?" counters the man, tugging on his slacks.

"I take offense to that," says Becker.

Jess squeezes past Becker and Claudia. "I'm sorry so the commotion and the misunderstanding," she says passionately, soothingly, hoping to resolve the tension. "I apologize for my boss…and my boyfriend. Um, I'm Jess, Jessica Parker. Nice to meet you."

The man removes the cigar from his lips, throwing it into his apartment. His eyebrows jumped. "Jessy, eh? Now I like you, you know how to act like a normal person, not like this creeps." He enthusiastically shakes her with both of his hands. Jess is confused, but tries to maintain a wide glowing smile.

"The name's Bryce Dallas Belkin, son of Howard Belkin. Former vice manager of Haystacker's Bookstore of the Insane, Chula Vista, California. Now unemployed in beautiful downtown London and fucking loving it."

"That's interesting, Bryce…Nice to meet you." Jess giggled.

"You're a tea party type, aren't you Jess? You look like the tea party type. Why don't I get dressed, and you tell your little friends here the calm the fuck down, and maybe I'll get ya' a couple of drinks, okay?" He closed the door behind him.

The others are less than pleased, even Becker. "Honey, what the fuck?" he asked.

"Do you realize what you've done?" opinioned Abby. "We're supposed to find out what happened the anomaly, not playing Mad Hatter and March Hare with this damn bozo."

"Dunno," says Connor. "Maybe he's a nice guy, once he doesn't look like he just got out of bed."

"Doubt it," grunts Abby. "He's are gnarly, messy. Like my first boyfriend in high school. Always in his bed, never out of bed. Disgusting."

"Indeed," agreed Gremm, his hand against his aching, bruised forehead. "And I'm going into that scumbag's den again."

Claudia reaches for the aspirin in her coat pocket. She seems to be needing it more and more these day. "Okay, let's make the best of it."

Bryce reopens the door. Connor, Abby, Becker, and Jess enter his condo. Claudia turns to Gremm, pressing her hands on his shoulders.

"You alright?"

"Well, I've just been thrown halfway across a room by a Zizekian sack of shit with serious temper issues," Gremm elaborates, "and I feel incredibly dizzy."

"Go to the truck, drive to our home. Get some rest on the sofa. I call our men to get the truck back here when we need to return to the ARC."

"Thank you, sweetheart."

Claudia plants a soft, posh kiss on Gremm's forehead, before entering Bryce's mancave. As the door closes, Gremm disappears, making his way down the hall to the elevators, a much less precarious route back to the parking garage.

"Alright, I guess its time for a more formal introduction," Jess states to Bryce. "This is my boss, Claudia Brown. And this my boyfriend, good ol' sweet Hilary Becker." She tugs at Becker's cheeks. "And this is Connor and Abby Temple…"

Claudia looks around the living room. Bryce makes much more use of the condo's space than Bentley. There are books everywhere, on the shelves, on the floor, strewn all over the place alongside clothes and bottles of gin. Bordiga, Bukharin, Chomsky, Dauvé, Pyatakov, Turner grace the covers of his library items. So many books. Did he have enough time to read them all?

There is no anomaly. No fungus, no even a single solitary spore on the hardwood floor. The coast is clear, for now at least.

She sits down along with the others on the cloth Felicerossi couches. Bryce barely covers his hangover-like appearance with a neon pink bathrobe. He starts pouring out Earl Grey in his visitor's coffee mugs.

"So, if you're unemployed, how do your afford all this?" Claudia asks.

"Inheritance money, duh?" Bryce answers. "I'm a single child, got all the money. Dad was the last of my immediate family to die. Got all his booty, his moola. Close to spending it all though, after all that traveling abroad. Who knows, maybe I'll get back into working soon."

"Traveling? Where?"

"Oh, in the northern Middle Eastern countries, south and east of Turkey. Backpacking and bike riding in Kurdish Syria mostly, also bits of Armenia and Azerbaijan. Incredibly scenery, incredible people. Especially now that the revolution seems to be winning out."

"Revolution?"

"The Kurdistan People's Army, KPA. They want a united Kurdistan separate from Turkey and Syria. It will be one of the first pure communes in the region, doing what the Ba'athists failed to achieve. While in the canyons of Rawandiz, I got caught in the crossfire of one of their battles. It was incredible, I was lucky to make it out alive. Bullets, misses flying, right of of nowhere. They're awesome fighters, bro. Taking on Al-Quaeda, ISIS, Assad, even the US. No one stands in their way. They give zero fucks."

"Sounds incredible," says Claudia, as she sips her tea.

"They got these…drones, they think that's what they are, stolen from the Americans and British. Planted, clamped on the skulls of soldiers. Like mind control, controlled by radio. But they've learned how to override it, to jam the signal. Now they use the technology against the Americans."

Claudia dropped the coffee mug out of her hand, spilling the Earl Grey all over the floor.

Drones. Plants. Clamps. Mind controls. Jamming the signals. This sounds like terminology concerning predators.

She remembers Gremm's words.

 _The predators switched sides, became their guardians, their pack animals._

 **2016 CE - Anomaly Research Center (ARC), classified location in Bromley, London, England, United Kingdom**

"What you mean they're cutting funding to the ARC?" hollers Lester, bellowing so loudly everyone in the ARC facility stops dead in their tracks.

"I'm sorry, Sir, but the government is reconsidering its priorities regarding the anomaly initiative," MoD Calvin Steering calmly explains through the speaker phone. "We're not scrapping the ARC completely, but we've reassessed our budget, our goals for the next decade or so, and we desperately need to restructure Mission Chronus. No one will be fired, they'll just be stationed at smaller facilities throughout the nation. We don't have the economic or social justification for maintaining your bulky, outdated Bromley facility."

Everyone in the ARC was listening to Steering's provocations. They saw the red writing on the wall.

"We're done for," Claudia huffed on the lower ground floor "I can't believe it. We're fucking done for."

"Guess we're going back to being zookeepers, huh Abby?" teased Connor.

Abby wryly smiled, but didn't seem to impressed with her husband's snark. They had enough money saved from HO paychecks to pay for little Nick Temple, but they would still have to find new jobs. And Abby definitely didn't want to go back to studying parasites in elephant job, an occupation that at any moment could also be on the chopping block post-Brexit.

Ghemm had no words. Sitting in Connor's moving chair in front of the ADD monitors, now screening the BBC News 24 broadcast, he saw the domino effect right before his eyes.

This was the beginning of the chaos. It all starts here. And it's worse than he ever imagined.

Bruce Patton had won the elections in America, with Howard Belkin as his Vice President. Both high-profile technocrats, trained in the military, made rich in Silicon Valley. Both self-proclaimed contrarians, populists, men who wanted to "make a new frontier for a America".

Gremm knows what these people are like. They are fascists. They're acting straight out of the playbook of Hitler and Mussolini. They have already brought death to countries abroad.

"Are you okay, sweetie," consults Claudia. She has noticed Gremm hasn't uttered a single word since the breaking news came on. She wraps her arms around him, nestling him against her kashmir sweatshirt.

"I failed," he whispered. "We failed. This is it, this is what happened."

They remember how that self-professed "anarchist" in Westminster, the young American Bryce Belkin, lied about his father's death.

 **2020 CE - off Huwaysat Island, United Arab Emirates, near Al Batha, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia**

Saya Membebaskan was born eighteen years ago on Pulau Bawean, a tiny sunlit island in a far off place called Indonesia. Her parents were fisherman and merchants who voyaged from place to place, never staying on one island for too long, so she never had a concept of a permanent home besides her mobile boat. But she's always wondered what that sort of home would be like. A home where she could be comfortable, with her family.

She was taken away from them when she was seven. She lagged behind them in the streets of downtown Jakarta, when she was strangled, muffled, cuffed, and taken into the alley. Next thing she knew, she was on a plane, pig-tied reverse prayer style on the flower with a machine gun to her head, headed to a land far beyond anything she can recollect. A land of sand, oil, and blood, where she would be sold in the underground, as a slave, a lowly title she retains to this day.

Most of the 'civilized' Muslim has long abandoned the practices of involuntary servitude, if not outright banned it, but it remains a fact of life for the sheikhs of the Saudi monarchy, the neo-Wahhabists and their contemporaries, who maintain the most political power in the Middle East. The influx of money from the west , primarily American and Britain, cements their power. They are unstoppable in their economic and political progress, both here in Saudi Arabia and in the United Arab Emirates across the disputed border to the east, which now boast manmade wonders rivaling in scale those of the West, many of which were built on the backs of abused cheap labor, including slaves.

Saya has only heard rumors of the Emirates from eavesdropping. It is a magical place. Islands of sand shaped like palms, or of all the lands of the world. A great pointed spiraling mass of glass and steel, the Burj Khalifa, a Ziggurat of Babylon dwarfing everything else in the surrounding dunes. A tower possibly reaching to the realm of Allah and Muhammad.

But is only for the rich. Only the rich are able to reach to the stars, the heavens, where everything is clean and virgin, and approved by the Americans and all the other Western pigs. The rest of society, the workers, the slaves, struggle for scraps.

Saya doesn't get to have fun here either. While Al'Ahmak Ghan and his socialites party to the sound of defeating electronic screeching until the sun goes down on their yacht, she has to scrub the poop deck spotless of spilled alcohol.

Any disobedience, however civil, will have dire consequences. She has heard the stories. Particularly that one about the slave rebellion along the Saudi border of Qatar, in which there were only a few survivors. Most were killed by the slaveowner's missile-carrying shepherd-drones, gifts from the Americans, and had to be replaced.

Those that survived and refused to confess their guilt were taken to special interrogation chambers deep underground, often below the sheikh's palaces and mansions. Here they were other drones, gifts from the British. Animals, almost ape-like or human-like in appearance, but only just, their thoughts and actions controlled by drones atop their heads, obeying the commands of the slaveowners, to beat slaves into submissions, sometimes to the death. Those that survived had the pencil-shaped puncture marks around the neck to tell the tale. Getting out of the lion's den, some called it. Those that didn't were thrown into what could only be described as a great pit of white fire, with no possible means of returning.

Saya doesn't know if these stories are entirely true, but she doesn't want to find out. She doesn't want to be killed in the lion's den. But then again, she doesn't want to waste her life in this mundane existence either, as a slave with no future of her own. Like many in her worn-dorm sandals, she wants to be free.

Dusk sets on the crystal clear water of the Dohat Sumaryah. A monuments rumbling shakes the boat. Past Ghagha Island and over the eastern peninsula, a white stream of smoke and fire erupts, brightening the night sky. Al'Ahmak Ghan and his friends, sunglasses on, watch in awe. At last, the Arab world has joined the great Space Race. Inside the speeding rocket are the first people from the Emirates to visit the grand cosmos, and make their constellation among the stars.

Saya could care less. There may be monsters on this earth, monsters under the earth, and vile corrupt plastic weaklings being sent to dethrone Allah himself, but it is here, in the gutters, on the wayside, hidden from the view of the upper classes, that true hardworking human beings lived, and these meek souls will one day be the inheritors of this world.


End file.
